29 November 2007

THEINSTITUTE of Contemporary Arts’ (ICA) Talks Programme for December begins on Monday, December 3 with Sylvia Plath Revisited.

In the light of the recent publication of Eye Rhymes, a book of largely unseen paintings and sketches by Sylvia Plath and new essays by Plath scholars, this evening revisits the great poet’s life and work, focusing on the relationship between the visual and verbal.

Draskau, Jennifer. 1991. The liberation of Sylvia Plath's Ariel psychosemantics and a glass sarcophagus. Publications on English themes, v. 15. [Copenhagen]: Dept. of English, University of Copenhagen.

21 November 2007

For any visitors to my Sylvia Plath website, www.sylviaplath.info, the website is down, and may be down for up to a week. I hope no longer than that. If things go well, however, when the site is back up it will be updated for the first time in over two years!! Something I hope you will enjoy!

19 November 2007

For any Swedish readers of Sylvia Plath, Symposium panelist Annika J. Hagström (Saturday afternoon session on Images and Viewers of Plath, paper title "Stasis in Darkness: Sylvia Plath as a Fictive Character") recently published this article in the Helsingborgs Dagblad.

17 November 2007

What follows is a bibliography of books by Sylvia Plath, including works available commercially and limited editions-including broadsides. I will update this list as I learn about new publications. If you see any gross mistakes, please let me know.

15 November 2007

This is the fifth year I'll be going. Typically there are some Sylvia Plath titles; like her copy of The Colossus inscribed to Theodore Roethke, or the typescripts of the Ariel poems (which recently sold to a private collector). I've seen first editions of The Bell Jar, Ariel, and other poetry and prose collections.

One highlight is Jett Whitehead's copy of Ariel, inscribed by Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, to his friend and collaborator, the Hungarian poet Janos Csokits, in April 1967.

Start your collection, build your collection, or simply come to browse at the beautiful world of antiquarian books.

14 November 2007

This is an event reminder that on 20 November, 2007, Tracy Brain will give a seminar titled "Representing Sylvia Plath".

Brain spoke on this topic during the Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium, impressively weaving into her paper events and "representations" taking place during the conference. With nearly three weeks passing since the end of the Symposium and this talk, the evening promises to be even more informative.

12 November 2007

The Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium featured several extra-curricular events for delegates and attendees. Each night during the symposium, Elisabeth Gray performed the one woman play Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath. I had the opportunity to see the play Friday night, which featured a lively but curtailed introduction by Dr. Barbara Mossberg, of California State University at Monterrey Bay. The play itself is somewhat reminiscent of Paul Alexander’s Edge, whereas Edge takes place in the last day/night of Plath’s life, Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath takes place in the last ten minutes of her life.

Gray’s character is Esther Greenwood, and the play starts with her head in an oven. In fact, when you enter the theatre, she’s already there. What followed was an emotional adventure. Alternating between deeply funny and tear-inducing sad, Gray hallucinates her way through a re-creation of events. She converses with her oven in a voice ripped off from the teacher in Charlie Brown, “waa-waawhaa-whaa”. As the hallucinations grow more severe, Esther stars in a TV show “Better Tomes and Gardens”, making different dishes, and reacting a video that plays off and on throughout the performance.

It was kind of a gutsy play to write, with serious potential to offend. The advertisement turned off several participants to the point of boycott. I admit, I found the promotion fliers offensively distasteful. While i t certainly has the potential to offend, it makes light of certain historical events associated with Plath. The video of the character Esther meeting Ned Pews (the Ted character) is absolutely side-splitting funny. This scene, and other clips from the play, appear on YouTube. The end, however, to this story is always the same. It is how the writer and actress portray the death that is a deal-breaker. Given the humor throughout, when the end comes you both expect, and almost do not expect, it to come the way it always does. I left the theatre highly amused at the funny bits, but ultimately ponderous at the very moving, almost sweet ending. A much disheveled Greenwood inches towards the oven while at the same time, her character with perfect hair and make-up reclines, as if to take a nap on the video screen. As with any emotional scene, the classical music playing rips through the heart leaving the entire audience stunned to silence, and also a few a tears.

In the Rothermere American Institute Library, an exhibit of poems in Enid Mark’s About Sylvia was on display throughout the Symposium. The poems in this collection are:

“On looking into Sylvia Plath’s copy of Goethe’s Faust” by Diane Ackerman“Cottage Street, 1953” by Richard Wilbur“The heroine” by Peter Davison“Dream song 172” by John Berryman“Wanting to die” by Anne Sexton“Requiem for Sylvia Plath” by Luciana Frezza“Daughters and others” by Rachel Hadas“Sylvia Plath” by Robert Lowell“On the death of Sylvia Plath”“Chaucer” by Ted Hughes.

Enid Mark contributes a Foreword to the book and illustrated each poem, and they appeared throughout the library in different cases. Many of the poems will be familiar to Plath’s readers, but some were new to me. Mark was a classmate of Plath’s and runs The Elm Press in Pennsylvania. About 34 of the 50 copies are held in Special Collections and Rare Book Rooms throughout the United States and abroad.

The Oxford Playhouse held several events, including an exhibit of artwork by Kristina Zimbakova, Amanda Robbins, Linda Adele Goodine, Cassandra Slone, and Ann Dingsdale. The artwork was on display in the Top Room, all around the walls, including the window treatments! These works were all inspired by Plath and available on posters for sale; anyone interested in purchasing these should contact the organizers to see if there are extras. It also premiered an animated short film by Suzie Hanna and Tom Simmons titled “The Girl Who Would Be God”. The animation was interesting, made more so by an introduction and explanation of its creation by Hanna and Simmons. The Playhouse also ran short films by the late Sandra Lahire, who was a student under the tutelage of Jacqueline Rose. They were disturbing, particularly the one titled “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams.” The films featured words spoken by Plath, excerpts from poems, in addition to footage of Winthrop, Boston, and other places.

Throughout the Symposium, a number of limited editions of Plath's were on display at the Divinity School at the Bodleian Library. These books made a brief appearance at the opening night festivities at Blackwell's and included the limited edition for Child, Fiesta Melons, Dialogue over a Ouija Board, and Million Dollar Month, amongst others.

The Symposium had a big Sunday bash: The Sylvia Plath Gala Celebration at the Oxford Playhouse. I wrote on this in a previous post. I left after the reading of “Three Women” so am unsure how the rest of the celebrants performed. After I left, however, Jack Harris performed his "Plath Lullaby", Hanna's animation "The Girl Who Would be God" aired, Susannah Harker read "Ariel", Natalia Thorn performed a dance to the "Poppy" poems and Tom Hollander performed "Red", which might be a poem from Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes or might be something else. If anyone cares to post on it, please leave comments!

10 November 2007

Recently The Scotsman and the Daily Mail reviewed The Letters of Ted Hughes, edited by Christopher Reid. The Daily Mail review includes some photographs, including a "new" one of Sylvia Plath at which her fans and scholars alike will marvel.

08 November 2007

Sylvia Plath's editor at Knopf was Judith Jones. Jones was an ardent and early supporter of Plath's poetry and fiction up to, and likely through, the publication of Ariel. Knopf lost the battle for Ariel to rival publishing house Harper & Row.

Ms. Jones recently published The tenth muse: My life in food. She will appear at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. on Tuesday 13 November. Tickets are on sale via the Harvard Book Store. Tickets are $5.

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin holds the correspondence between Jones, Plath, Hughes and others at Heinemann and Knopf. I posted on this collection back in July. The correspondence, negotiations, etc. makes for very interesting reading and is certainly worth of further study and publicity.

07 November 2007

The Massachusetts Historical Society holds the Atlantic Monthly records, 1969-1974. Of course the Atlantic has been around a long time, but these records relate to the editorship of Robert Manning. The collection includes correspondence with and records that relate to 3,200 authors. The records are stored offsite, so advance notice is required if anyone seeks to consult these records. The finding aid is online here.

There is correspondence between Olwyn Hughes and the editors at the Atlantic relating to publishing some of Sylvia Plath's and Ted Hughes's poems. These can be found in carton 9.

There are two letters from February and two from May.

1) From: Olwyn Hughes, To: Robert Manning, 2 February 1970. This letter discusses Olwyn's assembling two volumes of Plath's uncollected poetry. She offers the following Plath poems: "Last Words," "The Tour," "Submerged", and "Gigolo" as well as six Crow poems by Ted Hughes. The year of composition - 1961, 1962, 1962, and 1963, respectively - is listed next to each poem.

2) From: Robert Manning, To: Olwyn Hughes, 24 February 1970.Rejects all the poems by both Plath and Hughes.

Accompanying each set of letters are editorial responses to the poems submitted. There was an overwhelming dislike of the Hughes poems, including one editor saying, "The Hughes stuff, if I understand it, offers us Crow as Everyman. A damn silly idea."

The general consensus on the Plath poems submitted in February was that they all appeared "unfinished." The reviewers each liked "Last Words" and "The Tour", and found the poem "Submerged" to be "unclear, for all its ominous message, sensuous images."

Has anyone out there ever heard of a Plath poem entitled "Submerged", purportedly written in 1962? The other poems appeared throughout 1970 in periodicals, and also appeared in either Crossing the Water (1971) or Winter Trees (1971/2).

Could "Submerged" be a variant/rejected title of an Ariel poem? Not according to a review of the drafts Ariel poems housed at Smith College. One 1962 poem published around this time is "Fearful". However, it is not out of the question that there are other poems Plath wrote in 1962 that have been suppressed?

Amanda Golden (University of Washington) and Pamela St. Clair (Cape Fear Community College) recently guest edited the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany (VWM). The VMW is a publication focusing on Woolf studies and related topics. The Spring/Summer issue features a selection of articles on "scholars' interest in Woolf's role as a female literary predecessor" (1). The following are articles, essays and poems on the topic of Plath and Woolf:

"Sylvia Plath's Reading of Virginia Woolf: A Chronology" by Amanda Golden"Frontispiece" [A poem] by May Swenson"The Fisherman and His Wife as Uncanny Motif in Woolf and Plath" by Dianne Hunter"A Plath Photograph, Annotated: Point Shirley, 1936" by Anita Helle"Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath: The Self at Stake" by Solenne Lestienne"I Who Want Not to Be" by Nephie Christodoulides"Barren Women: Figurative Babies and the Spectre of Motherhood" by Felicity Plunkett"Courting Danger: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Wooing at London Zoo" by Richard Espley"Linden Flowers" [A poem] by Catherine BergThe essays and poems make use of both Plath's and Woolf's personal libraries, journals, letters, and other materials now housed in archives.

For information on obtaining this issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, please to Vara Neverow, neverowv1@southernct.edu

02 November 2007

Would readers be interested in a list of books about Sylvia Plath which were never in English, like Marianne Egeland's Sylvia Plath? Or, would you be interested in a list of books that were in English but translated into a foreign language, such as Janet Malcolm's The Silent Women, translated to German Die schweigende Frau : die Biographien der Sylvia Plath.